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Wired is running a story about Wikipedia's tremendous contribution to documenting the history of video games, and why it shouldn't necessarily be relied upon. Quoting:
"Wikipedia requires reliable, third-party sources for content to stick, and most of the sites that covered MUDs throughout the ’80s were user-generated, heavily specialized or buried deep within forums, user groups and newsletters. Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... while cataloging gaming history is a vitally important move for this culture or art form, and Wikipedia makes a very valiant contribution, the site can’t be held accountable as the singular destination for gaming archeology. But as it’s often treated as one, due care must be paid to the site to ensure that its recollection doesn’t become clouded or irresponsible, and to ensure its coalition of editors and administrators are not using its stringent rule set to sweep anything as vitally relevant as MUDS under the rug of history."

Something must be notable *and* written about in a reputable academic source in order to be appropriate content for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place for people who want to publish new material, no matter how important it is that there be such publication. It's good to see that there are specialised wikis for ad-hoc history projects of MUDs - that's appropriate, and it avoids all these issues of notability and original content.

Just because a task is worthwhile/important doesn't mean Wikipedia is the right place for it.

There is no requirement that something be written about in an academic source to be included in wikipedia. Any reputable source will generally do, including newspapers and magazines in most cases.

Any game that had a substantial influence shaping the development of gaming is worthy of inclusion. That doesn't mean that it won't be difficult to find good sources to back up the argument that it was in fact influential.

What about Franko the crazy revenge [youtube.com]? (NSFW) I would doubt gaming newspapers would be keen to write about it. It also doesn't help that it's in Polish.I could argue that with its brutal realism/cynism it was a forerunner for GTA.

Something must be notable *and* written about in a reputable academic source in order to be appropriate content for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place for people who want to publish new material, no matter how important it is that there be such publication. It's good to see that there are specialised wikis for ad-hoc history projects of MUDs - that's appropriate, and it avoids all these issues of notability and original content.

Just because a task is worthwhile/important doesn't mean Wikipedia is the right place for it.

This, quite frankly, is sheer rubbish, and it's really sad that it got modded to +5 - and even sadder that a lot of Wikipedia editors and admins today share this view.

Remember the fuss about Mzoli's [wikipedia.org]? If not, basically, this was an article that Jimbo Wales started; some admin speedy-deleted it pretty much right away for much the same reasons you cite, and the whole thing eventually ballooned into a big discussion of what Wikipedia is about, with various kinds of fallout [wikipedia.org].

As someone who generates academic material, I think this is a flawed position.

Academic publishing takes time, often a *lot* of time, depending on discipline. History journals and those in the social sciences are generally quite slow-moving. Wikipedia can be there to catalog things that would never see academic publication, and never will if they aren't cataloged *now*.

Wikipedia is for groundswell. Wikipedia should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. No one in their right mind would cite wiki

If it were more culturally or socially relevant, there probably would have been more sources out there. Sounds like a small community of people are upset that nobody took the time to write about their favorite game.

Sounds like a small community of people are upset that nobody took the time to write about their favorite game.

I don't think any specific MUD is as important as the concept of having some idea of what it is. Without those 100,000 people who played text muds in the 90's as the only online role-playing outlet, there could never be a successful Warcraft, which is like a graphical mud with a giant exclamation mark.

The MUD I still play was where Brad McQuaid played before he created EverQuest. He used a lot of content from it in EQ. Fortunately, the MUD was mentioned in at least two published books and a published interview with Brad, so it's got citations enough to stay alive. I'm just wondering what other MUDs out there don't have such citations, but still have the history. Where did the EQ devs play?

Eventually, the community decided to move on, and founded MUD Wiki, a Wikia dedicated to the genre.

Exactly! I'd expect to find specific information about obscure Star Trek characters (even those I consider important for some obscure reason) on Memory Alpha, and not in Wikipedia. A link from main Wikipedia to the MUD wiki, explaining that more information is available there seems appropriate. IIRC, such things have been done in other Wiki articles...

Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias.

Ok, so how the fuck does the whole "randomly delete stuff that doesn't make it over an arbitrary notability hurdle" fit into that premise? How is deleting stuff from Wikipedia and moving it to a commercially hosted website outside of Wikipedia fixing the issue?

I am certainly not going to donate any more money when the stuff I am interesting in has to be found in a Wiki that isn't even part of Wikipedia.

...is questionable. There had been a significant contributor to the indie player-run shard scene from the late 90's / early 2000's which was the community which showcased one of the most popular Ultima Online shards at the time. It had hundreds of contributors and players in its tenure over the span of 5-7 years, sported a custom scripting language enabling its developers to release features which (at the time) OSI was "thinking about" releasing on the paid-subscription UO servers.

When I happened upon its Wikipedia article a few years ago, it had been subject to deletionists, who challenged the authenticity of the information presented. Being one of the administrators on the server during the height of its popularity, I counter-challenged with some URLs of fan pages and other related articles, and undeleted a list of staff members who had contributed to the server's evolution over time. The deletionist backed off once another former player joined in the argument.

However, due to the diligence of the deletionists, the Wikipedia page is no more. Good to know that, while history can be remembered by those who experienced it while they yet live, those institutions that are in place to remember it for all time have selective memory.

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there [wikia.com] and very successful ones like Wookiepedia [wikia.com] and Mangawiki [wikia.com]. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of s

I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests.

Wikipedia used to be "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", normal populace and hardcore fans of specific interests alike. Coincidentally, the List of Catgirls [wikipedia.org] article is doing quite well.

is any indication of the flowers we could find if in chance the poster or that persons brethren may be allowed to in fact modify said obscure game entries in the previously refered to Wikipedia it may become an eventuality that it would suck to read.

I am going to deem this a "tight loss". New term, but look it up shortly in wiki. I am pretty sure its going to mean what you think it means.

Wikipedia is not the right reference to use. *shock* *horror* *how dare someone insinuate that "the wikipedia" is not the fount of all human knowledge!* The best place for research is USENET (search for "Google Groups" instead these days) because that's the only central location where games discussions went on back then. Sure, there were BBS and such, but one-node communications platforms are very limited.

Wikipedia is lousy for a lot of recent history precisely because (as soon as you drift away from relatively mainstream stuff) so little of it has been documented elsewhere on the web - I've seen plenty of articles myself which I'm 100% certain are factually inaccurate, and I can name the inaccuracies - but I can't find an appropriate citation. So any correction I make is likely to have a very limited life expectancy.

I spent a while doing that on every article I could find. Almost every article on Wikipedia is grossly deficient in citations if you follow the regulations some nerd throws at you. So I got fed up and went to one of the more objectionable's favourite page and started adding [citation needed] after every factual statement that lacked verification. There's a shocking amount of things that are just accepted on pretty much any Wikipedia article.

I got banned for a few days for that.

I think I'm going to go back to it, actually, and see if I can get the whole IP range of my city knocked out.

I've seen plenty of articles myself which I'm 100% certain are factually inaccurate, and I can name the inaccuracies - but I can't find an appropriate citation. So any correction I make is likely to have a very limited life expectancy.

Even in that case where your edits would likely be reverted, you still must make it and/or discuss it in the talk page.

Wikipedia is designed for that eventuality; it exposes not only the article's contents but the process by which editors arrived to them. If you know for true a fact but can't provide references, explaining that in the talk page will expose the situation to future researchers.

Someone really interested will read through the talk archives or even the change logs to find what has been discussed

And then someone changes it back. Unless you're unemployed and have absolutely no life you can't win; people camp on their favourite page and revert a few times. Then it gets locked down through too many reversions and they go running and crying to some admin for "arbitration" which they win because they've got a longer history on Wikipedia. This happens regardless of whether you, as a genuine expert in the field with access to relevant, well-sourced citations, are right or wrong.

It's pretty difficult to write the history of ANYTHING if you don't record stuff along the way. Sure, we know when certain game systems and games were released, but that's just a time line. Genuine history happens in between those major events and is pretty difficult to summarize if someone didn't put it all down on paper/disc.

Also, Wiki is a starting place for research-- not the end-all academic source of knowledge for the human race. If you see something that interests you, check the sources and go from t

There are some references on Wikipedia into the internet archive [archive.org], also known as the "way back machine". If your site was archived there I think editors would attempt to change references to this record. If it was completely gone I think it would probably be preserved with a "citation needed" tag.

That's hilarious! My old Quake site, the Springfield Fragfest, is in the wayback machine, and most of what I posted was parody and fiction about the various players and web sites in the community. And there were others that did the same thing. I remember one post I made that had one guy's shambler pissing on his couch. "Kneel" Harriot's site Yello There had my grandmother living under his porch.

I should dig some of those old posts out and rerun them as slashdot journals...

If it is of importance to you, why not create a page on your own site which is entirely under your own control and there you can state all your opinions as well as facts with or without citations. If you like you could then create a wikipedia stub which could reference your own page. It's then up to the wikiguardians to decide if the wiki page is appropriate, etc.

Wikipedia is useful, but it's not the be all and end all of information resources on the web.

Supose I create a wiki entry with info about an old and obscure game from the 80s. As Wikipedia is not primary source I add references from an obscure forum. Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found. What you would do with my entry? would you preserve it because is actual info (althought unconfirmable)? would you delete it?

They would delete it right away as forums are not considered reliable due to lack of editorical oversight. Wikipedia gives really biased information for anything that isn't mainstream and well documented elsewhere.

Also their rules on what is and what is not notable are arbitary so you may well fall on the wrong side of that.

Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found.

No online reference can be considered permanent. But with luck the Wayback Machine [archive.org] will have archived it. If I find a dead link in Wikipedia I may look there and update it with the Wayback link.

Supose I create a wiki entry with info about an old and obscure game from the 80s. As Wikipedia is not primary source I add references from an obscure forum. Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found.

Not a major issue:

* archive.org contains snapshots of the web from various points of time. If the forum was archived, then you can switch the link around.* Specialized gaming wikis are more likely to still provide game content if the game becomes old or obscure. gaming.wikia.com is one of them.* Even if it's deleted, you can still request the entire page history from an admin if you want to import it onto another wiki.

Only because so few of them remain. If every bowl made in the last 2000 years still existed in tact, nobody would put them in museums. Similarly, preserving every game, regardless of merit or noteworthiness devalues all games.

The pottery bowl represents probably about 0.0001% of the items that were available during its given century of origin. Most of the other items from that specific time frame are not known to us anymore. As soon as the obscure game is the only game known from its time, it will be notable. Which probably needs some milleniae to pass and knowledge about our civilization to disappear almost completely, before the game is rediscovered. But not necessarily.

Its not primarily about age, its about how much is known about a decade/century/era in general. If 2000 years pass and about all computer games from the 80s are still known by then, the obscure game will still be... well, obscure. And only marginally more notable than it is today.

Two things here. Firstly, you're making the assumption that you will have contemporary platforms and games in abundance in the year 3000. That's not for certain at all - much in the same way that there is no preponderance of pottery from 0 AD. Time and attrition reduce the supply of artifacts, and that reduced supply makes them more valuable due to their scarcity. It is worth proactively preserving the substance of computer game lore precisely because it is mundane now, and hence easily protected. If y

You're picking and choosing your logical constants in a way that only supports your own position. Open your mind a bit:

Otherwise it would be a tape, perhaps but probably not with something still written on it, and totally useless. How could they tell it wasn't Enya?

Do you assume that the LP's in the Smithsonian actually get played? Do the ancient pieces of pottery still ever hold food and drink? Or do people just look at them as examples?

Secondly, I specified a *shitty* Pacman clone.

Perhaps future generations would marvel at how shitty it was. You can't rightly say. Again there are a lot of pieces of pottery that are mere fragments of a functional device. You'd be pretty pissed if I tried to pour your soup into such a fragment, because it makes for a really shitty bowl. Yet it is under glass, all the same.

Thirdly, you do realise that you're arguing about preserving a fictional (shitty) Pacman clone for a (shitty) 80s computer for some fictional museum in the year 3000 on the off-chance that the curator of the museum would give a fuck or even know what this piece of warped plastic he's been handed actually is?

Actually, I believe he's arguing that those who wish to preserve it not be prohibited from doing so. It isn't as if this is some 'you must preserve it' mandate. Only an appeal against the arbitrary restrictions.

You're saying it shouldn't be kept, while failing to realize that a lot of our antiquities in museums today were found in burial sites, sewers, and/or toilets. The people of that time didn't necessarily want to keep it either. They didn't judge the value of it in the same way we do today - which is rather the problem with your position, isn't it?

I'd quote the final stanza and rebut it thusly, but the point's made: You're not in the future, and are incapable of accurately anticipating what will or will not be of value. Gnash teeth if you wish, but lay of the obstructionism until your time machine is completed...

Why not? Do they have to be both old and obscure to not be notable, or simply one or the other? There are many obscure games that have notable qualities for things like being the first in some genre, or first to implement some now well known concept.

What about this article on "Computer Space" [wikipedia.org]. I'd never even heard of this game until right now, but it was the world's first coin operated video game. I think that's pretty notable. What about Karate Champ [wikipedia.org]? I found it on Wikipedia last week after someone mentioned the developer here on Slashdot. I'd never heard of this game, but it was the first ever side view beat'em up. Again, I think that's pretty notable.

You might not be interested in gaming history, but a lot of people are, and will be.

Oops, that's what I get for going by memory. The Karate Champ article does say it's only "has been believed to be" the first side view beat'em up, but somehow it still stuck in my head as that.

I even read the HeavyWeight champ stub last week too, but I guess this part caused me to kind of mentally discard it, especially since it was controlled by boxing gloves rather than a controller, so the characters probably couldn't move and therefore it wasn't what we'd think of as a modern beat'em up, it it sounds mo

It is one of the first fighting games, and has been believed to be the first to use today's common side-perspective. However, Heavyweight Champ, released in Japan by Sega, used the same perspective and predates Karate Champ by eight years.

The "not notable" argument is bullshit anyway. When Wikipedia started one of the main principals was that "Wikipedia is not paper", i.e. there is no limit to the amount of information and relevant material should never be removed on the grounds of brevity or it not being notable enough. Somewhere along the lone the deletionists got that changed and started burning articles as fast as they could.

I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not have an article on almost any subject, no matter how obscure, so long as there is reasonable reference material to base it on. First hand accounts by those involved who went on to write web sites should be permissible when they do not appear biased. Editors have to decide on that, not just make up absolute rules and use them to diminish Wikipedia.

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles for everybody's local chess club or WOW guild or band they formed with their high school friends that lasted for about a week before everybody lost interest after their dad said they couldn't practice in his garage anymore because he needs to put the car back in.

Nobody is accessing Wikipedia by looking at an index of all the pages it contains, but by using search and search doesn't care if there are millions of other unrelated pages around.

And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.

And none of those features (except the interface, obviously) happen with non-notable topics.

Then stick one of those templates {{Refimprove}} or whatever templates at the top of the page. Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong, not for pages where everybody agrees that the information is correct and just missing a reference to something printed on dead trees.

Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong

No, if information is wrong, it should be corrected, not deleted. If it's cruft it should be deleted. If it's notable but missing a few reference, then it should be improved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for a moment trying to argue that Wikipedia is perfect, it's far from it, but non-notable articles should be removed. The only problem is over-zealous editors who think that because they haven't heard of it, it must be non-notable. It's happen to me, and I was able to get my article back.

Why should "non-notable" articles be removed? What's wrong with being able to look up plot summary information for every movie ever made (even ones that got poor ratings or which sold poorly, such as The 13th Floor)? Is there a problem with extending that level of detail to episodes of Firefly, Sailor Moon, or an exhaustive description of historical steam trains?

As long as someone is willing to put the time into writing it (and referencing it, and formatting it well, etc), it seems like it only adds value to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles for everybody's local chess club or WOW guild or band they formed with their high school friends that lasted for about a week before everybody lost interest after their dad said they couldn't practice in his garage anymore because he needs to put the car back in.

And in what way would the supposed "good information" get lost? Is the wiki search going to stop returning results just because there are 10000 junk articles?

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles

"Lost"? There are billions of webpages on the Internet, more every day, and yet none of the pages I want to access get "lost". You see only one page at a time. It doesn't get squashed if there are 10 million other articles on the same server.

It gets lost because having an article on Wikipedia is no longer a sign that the topic is notable.

So what? People who don't want to see the non-notable articles don't have to view them and the articles that they do deem "notable" are still there and are still just as accessible as they have always been. Nothing is "lost".

Yes it is, because being in Wikipedia is no longer an indication of noteworthiness. Please try reading my post before you reply so I don't have to repeat myself. The notable topics are still there, but being there no longer indicates that they are notable, so how do you tell the difference?

And why act like Wikipedia is the sole repository for all human knowledge? If your pet topic isn't included in Wikipedia, then go start your own Wiki for it (as lots of people already have for any number of specialized to

Those kinds of articles are rightly removed because they are impossible to cite or verify. I am not arguing otherwise.

Some idiots tried to remove the article on EnCase, one of the most popular digital forensics tools. It is widely used, there are training courses for it, papers dedicated to thwarting it. The argument was that there were no citations in mainstream media so instead of trying to find some they tried to delete it. I'm sure there are many articles about it in digital forensics magazines, and any

You clearly aren't involved with wikipedia. Anyone who is remotely involved in anti-vandalism and article clean-up knows how much crap people try to shovel into wikipedia on a daily basis. I mean, besides the obvious trolls and vandals who add all sorts of puerile comments to articles, there is a constant barrage of articles being created on all sorts of absurd subjects, such as spam articles on small irrelevant companies which have just been founded, local wannabe models who managed to pay a semi-professional photographer to take a couple of amateurish photos of them, garage bands which were created last week by a set of teens that don't even own any instruments, etc etc etc...

And these are only a few examples of the obvious, clear cut trash which popped into wikipedia in the couple of minutes it took me to write this post. Now, extrapolate that to any time frame you wish to imagine. Imagine how much crap that amounts.

Another thing that you fail to understand is that there isn't a horde of meanies who are single-handedly deleting articles off of wikipedia. Wikipedia established a long time ago a democratic process. A user cannot delete articles. The only thing a user can do is nominate an article for deletion. Then, the fate of that article is decided after a week-long discussion among users, who vote on what to do with the article. There is no "deletionist" policy, only discussion among peers to decide what to do with articles covering all sorts of questionable issues. Have any doubt? Then look for yourself and discover Wikipedia's process to delete articles [wikipedia.org]. You only need a valid account to vote, so put your money where your mouth is.

On top of that, people like you must understand what would wikipedia's fate be if the community didn't imposed some sort of filter on the changes being committed to their articles. To put it quite bluntly, wikipedia would be the new geocities, where 95% of the pages were filled with complete crap. This sort of criticism targetted at how wikipedia's community manages wikipedia's articles boils down to the belief that no one should ever touch your pet article, no matter the intention and no matter how absurd it may be. And that is no way to manage a knowledge repository which some people try to make it to be useful enough as a reference.

An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).

I used to contribute quite a bit to WP. For an example of how it should be done I suggest comparing the Japanese and English articles on cats.

They both contain quite a bit of information, but the Japanese version goes further by including less well cited material that is generally accepted by most editors and which adds interesting points and trivia to the page. Even the language of the material is a bit softer - not less accurate, just more readable and not so much just the presentation of a series of cited facts like the English article is in places.

I suppose it depends what you think WP is for. I don't think it should be just a collection of citable facts. WP should be more than that though, it should both inform and be readable, even entertaining. As long as the article is well organised there is little lost by including detail, minor though it may be.

WP is not a democracy. The idea is to reach a consensus with a senior editor reviewing the arguments and making a decision. That unfortunately leads to bias. Deletionists also love trying to fast-track articles for deletion so that there can't be a proper debate. Minor articles are particularly vulnerable to that as often only a few editors have contributed and thus have it on their watch list, so they get fast-track deleted before there is a chance to react. Believe it or not most of us have other things to do than edit WP and try to keep a handle on article burning.

An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).

Boy, you sure picked an appallingly bad example to try to complain about articles being deleted. Care to know why?

Hi, I'm the author of Zenburn. Yes, Zenburn is nothing special, it's definitely not a product, just a color scheme which many people use and have ported to different editing environments. My guess is that the page at Wikipedia seems to have origin

What is insignificant to one person is interesting and important to another person. What is the harm in having a lot of irrelevant articles that only a few people ever look at? Maybe that small insignificant band one day becomes famous. It would be nice to have the full history of page modifications on Wikipedia.

That is true, what's insignificant to one person may be interesting or even important to another person. Yet, this fact isn't being questioned, nor is Wikipedia's article deletion process designed to target uninteresting subjects. It is not nor it ever was about meaning or interest: it's about filtering out the crap which has no business in an encyclopedia-like medium to begin with. And there is no clear line in the sand that defines which is meaningful and which isn't. This is why Wikipedia relies on a democratic process, one which depends on the involvement of the entire community, to decide what to do with a contested article.

Therefore, if an article which you believe is meaningful happened to be voted off wikipedia then either you failed to get involved in the decision process or, quite bluntly, the article was in fact cruft. Either way, the process relies on users, such as yourself, to get involved, as no one single handedly decides or has the power to simply delete articles at will.

You seem to think that if there are too many insignificant articles, then we won't be able to find the important ones.

Please don't try to put words in my mouth. I never even referred to any ability to search for articles, let alone any difficulty in doing so due to the number of "insignificant articles". It is a silly, baseless idea.

Allowing these trivial contributions also encourages the submitter/editor to make other more valuable contributions. Compare this to deleting their article, however insignificant, which will likely make them never want to contribute again.

One thing that those who complain about this sort of issue tend to forget is that Wikipedia is not a free hosting company. No one has the right to host their pet project on Wikipedia's servers. There are countless hosting companies out there which provide that type of service, such as free blogs and even free wikis.

If you truly want to contribute to a knowledge repository then you must respect the principles that were set to run them. The very nature of Wikipedia is that it's a public repository of encyclopedic information which is democratically run by the wikipedia community. It is not anyone's blog, nor it is your very own personal server. Therefore, if anyone wishes to contribute to wikipedia then they need to acknowledge that:

a) anyone can edit anythingb) everyone has the right to "be bold" about their editsc) in cases where conflicts happen, the community as a whole is engaged in deciding what to do.

That means that no one has the right to unilaterally impose changes to articles. Even when articles are deleted, their deletion is triggered by any user's suspicion that the article is unworthy of being hosted by wikipedia. Yet, the only thing that that particular user can do is simply nominate the article for deletion, where he can only present the reasons why he believes the article should be deleted. His weight on the issue is the same as everyone else's: a single vote.

There is no "deletionist" policy

Yes, there is. The fact that an article can be deleted means there is a deletionist policy.

That's absurd and even you must be aware of how silly that statement is.

Even spam articles IMO should only be hidden, and not deleted.

That's stupid. Why would Wikipedia waste their scarce resources storing the countless floods of spam that plague wikipedia? Can you imagine the amount of storage you would need if you simply never deleted a single spam email that you managed to receive?

The search engine used to be terrible but is much better now. If Google can pull all that information off random web pages it should not be too hard to do with nicely structured and marked up WP articles.

Anime characters, episodes of such series, music artists, individual songs, all those things have warranted their own pages. It all comes down to, which editor did you run afoul of and how good of week did they have.

What does that have to do with anything? I was 1 year old when it was brought out, so it's both old and obscure to me, yet I still think it has value and a place in Wikipedia.

In 100 years, very few people will have ever seen an original Karate Champ arcade. Does that mean it should be deleted from Wikipedia or a similar resource? Or is it all the more reason to keep a record of it?

My first post was in response to the point that "old/obscure games are not notable", which I think is a matter of opinion. If the majority of people decide in 200 years that old and obscure video games are notable, yet nobody has preserved information on them, then it would be a shame. Wikipedia's resources are finite of course, but just because something is old or obscure is not a reason to delete it. There has to be some more compelling reason IMO.

I think the point is that not all old/obscure games are notable. Neither are all old/obscure games notable. Being old and/or obscure has no bearing on whether or not something is notable or not.

Neither is Wikipedia responsible for being the sole depository of all knowledge of mankind (nor has it ever claimed to be). People are acting like if it's not in Wikipedia, it will disappear for ever. The whole point of TFA wasn't to claim that Wikipedia should preserve all gaming history, but that it can't be relied

Not sure what point you are trying to make since the two games you mention both have Wikipedia articles (that you link to) because they are notable. Just because you, personally, hadn't heard of them before doesn't impact their notability.

So what's your point? Should every piece of Wii shovelware have an article?

Wikipedia is problematic beyond problematic. Want to know why? Here's a transcript of a Jason Scott presentation [cow.net] that goes over a lot of it.

The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.

Once you get to be an "admin", basically anything goes. That's when you start entertaining offers to be the protecting force for groups of people who create politics, that's when you start being verbally obtuse if not outright abusive towards any new editors, and that's where the whole system falls apart. Want to try to repair an article, add links? Ok, but now you have to speak 18 categories of acronyms, you have to be online 24/7 to instantly respond to "questions" that can be posed in a dozen or more possible places ranging from your talk page, other editors talk pages, article talkpage, "related" article talkpages, various "admin" forums, two or three email forums, and on and on. You have to master an entire subset of "how to write a citation" code rather than sticking a link at the end of the line, because otherwise some ass-hat will revert you and claim you're spamming.

It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing [wired.com] incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."

Wikipedia has flaws, but you're better off finding real, sane discussion of those flaws than listening to a rabid troll. Jason Scott makes stuff up. He did it with much of his BBS "history", and he's making it up here. He has a grudge against Wikipedia because he brought his pairing of grand ego and crazy to the project, and could not handle when people disagreed with him on topics he tried to own. He then left in a huff, and was angry when his attempts to remove the contributions he made (under the regular

Journal of a former wikipedia admin [livejournal.com] - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).

Cites and Insights carries a long history [citesandinsights.info] of articles on the subject.

The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.

Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed [google.com]. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.

Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.

The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list [theregister.co.uk] affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job [theregister.co.uk] analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.

Do you have any idea how big Wikipedia is? Finding and fixing the whole project, or even noticing what I believe to have probably been rare abuses, is beyond the ability of any one person. I did my best for the project given how much time and attention I was willing to give to it.

[quote]It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing [wired.com] incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."[/quote]

That's exactly what the deletionists strike me as, griefers. And they ge

The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.

Yep. "Cesspool" would be my one-word description of choice for Wikipedia, but insular circle-jerk has a nice ring to it, too.

I've added ISBN numbers to bibliographies (a minor, completely uncontroversial edit) and had a jackass admin (JayJG) autorevert the changes within 30 seconds. They own the page in question, against wikipedia policy. Putting a warning on their page that they're violating wikipedia policy results in one of their admin friends coming in, removing the warning, and then warning me to not fuck with them. This isn't an isolated incident either - I've basically given up on contributing to Wikipedia.

You want to know why I didn't click on your face to give you money, Jimmy Wales? That's why.

Vitally relevant to that particular field, the study of game history and game development. I don't think anyone - except perhaps you - was under the impression that the author was actually suggesting MUDS are vitally relevant in a universal sense.

When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant. There were a LOT of MUDS out there, and they were generally very easy to modify by anyone with a very slight amount of technical skill and interest in game design and development. As a resul

I see Usenet cited a bit on Wikipedia. Heck, thats the only source for a lot of legitimate information on computing related topics. Look up the history of the 2IMG disk image format used by Apple II emulators. The details of the file format was hammered out between two emulator authors on Usenet.

Overstating the influence? The problem is that articles are created based on references, not "influence" and references as an indication of influence just doesn't make sense for MUDs or many other Internet-based phenomena. There are plenty of things which have about as much influence as MUDs but which get articles simply because they have more references.

there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website.

Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing, just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.

Classic example of this is homebrew: You will have no shortage of people with experience with it, you won't have an issue finding numerous webpages, wikis and fo